Oct. 26, 2006 — NASA's rover Spirit marked its 1,000th day on Mars on Thursday on a work break due to a communications blackout.
Mars is on the far side of the sun relative to Earth, effectively blocking Spirit's radio contact for another two weeks, until Nov. 10. But the rover's milestone did not pass unnoticed.
In celebration of the hardy rover, which had been designed to last only about 90 days on Mars, engineers assembled more than 2,000 individual pictures taken by Spirit over the past six months as it sat on a hill in Gusev Crater.
The images were taken with all 13 color filters of the rover's panoramic camera and represent the largest and highest resolution view of Mars taken by Spirit or its identical twin Opportunity since the probes began their studies nearly three years ago. The colors shown in the 360-degree panorama are close to what the human eye would see.
Spirit is in the waning days of its second Martian winter and so far appears to have survived relatively unscathed. With little sunlight to charge its batteries, the rover has had a light work schedule, but power levels are slowly starting to rise.
"We're still being pretty stingy about the kinds of observations we do," said Cornell University astronomer Jim Bell, the science team leader for the rovers' panoramic cameras. "Survival is still job number one."
Spring in Mars' southern hemisphere where Spirit is located begins in early 2007. Rover operators hope to get Spirit positioned to a scientifically interesting site in the inner basin of the Columbia Hills before then. The new panorama, dubbed "McMurdo," will be used to pinpoint and plot a path to the rover's next stop.
Meanwhile on the other side of the planet, Opportunity remains at the rim of a massive crater known as Victoria, working to assemble a three-dimensional image of the crater's layered rocks and craggy walls. Both rovers were dispatched to Mars to search for signs of past water.
Opportunity has found evidence of a shallow salty sea. Scientists now want to know how widespread the water was and if it existed long enough for life to form. Opportunity will mark its 1,000th day on Mars on Nov. 15.
